Whatever happened to short biographies? For what seemed like ages I had in my work room three that I could have piled up and used as a stepladder: Ron Chernow’s 1,200-page life of Mark Twain, Sam Tanenhaus’ 1,040-page biography of William F. Buckley, and True Nature, Lance Richardson’s 736-page life of Peter Matthiessen.[1] The Chernow, I confess, I’m still trying to finish. The Buckley bio, on the other hand, is so good that I found it hard to put down. And the Richardson book, though the shortest of the three, sometimes felt like the slowest. It often reminded me of those treks Matthiessen was so famous for making: arduous, exhausting even, but also full of insights and surprises. In the end you’re relieved to be done but, all things considered, glad you made the trip.
Richardson’s previous book was a breezy, gossipy, and affectionate biography of Tommy Nutter, the eccentric Savile Row tailor who dressed, among many others, the Beatles (or three of them, anyway), Mick Jagger, and Elton John. True Nature couldn’t be more different. It’s deeply and meticulously researched, thorough almost to a fault, and the product of devotion so extreme it almost killed the author. Not content just to read about Matthiessen’s famous ascent to Shey Gompa, a Buddhist monastery high in the Nepali Himalayas, Richardson undertook the climb himself, until he began bleeding from the nose and listening to an ominous rattle in his chest. A doctor later told him those were the early symptoms of pulmonary edema.
Matthiessen wrote a lot—more than 30 books—and Richardson has read and reread them all. He also interviewed practically everyone who knew Matthiessen, and, with the help of his family, was able to study his letters and journals and an unfinished memoir. By now he probably knows all there is to know about Matthiessen, and he almost certainly understands him better than Matthiessen, always a bundle of contradictions, understood himself. (James Salter used to complain that people were always asking to be introduced to Matthiessen. The problem, he said, was figuring out “which Peter Matthiessen they would like to meet.”)
Richardson has gone to all this trouble in large part because he is convinced that Matthiessen is an important American writer, unjustly neglected now and deserving of the kind of biography that might put him back on the map. Matthiessen is, so far, the only writer to have won the National Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction, but he always insisted that only the fiction mattered. His journalism, he said—his travel and nature writing—was just what he did to pay the bills. “It drains my batteries,” he complained. This is not entirely true. Even after his novels began to make money (his 1965 breakout book, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, was eventually made into a movie and earned him millions in today’s currency), Matthiessen would routinely drop everything, including his family, for the chance to hop on a plane and write about someplace distant and exotic. The older he became, the less able he was to sit still. (When he was in his 80s, he was audited by the IRS, on the grounds that nobody that old could possibly travel enough to justify the huge expense deductions he was claiming.) Nor is any of the nonfiction remotely like hackwork. It’s journalism of the highest order. Even so, he insisted that fiction was the nobler calling. Nonfiction, he said, was like cabinetmaking—a craft and not real art. He would be dismayed—and, given his hot temper, probably enraged—to learn that his novels are mostly unread now, and I doubt that Richardson’s book will do much to change that. Matthiessen’s legacy will almost certainly continue to be the nature writing, and one book in particular, The Snow Leopard, about a 1973 expedition to the Himalayas that he made with the famous biologist George Schaller. Schaller wanted to study the mating habits of the rare Himalayan blue sheep. Matthiessen was hoping for spiritual enlightenment, and maybe a glimpse of the elusive title creature. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that he got neither.
But if Matthiessen’s writing doesn’t entirely justify a biography as substantial as this, his eventful life surely does. He was at various times a spy for the CIA, a commercial fisherman, an explorer, a pioneering environmentalist, a druggie, a political activist, a yeti and Bigfoot obsessive, and a Zen priest. Richardson’s book is subtitled The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, and the pilgrimage metaphor is an apt one. All his life Matthiessen was on a quest to discover who he really was and to find a simpler, more authentic way of life.
His beginnings couldn’t have been more fortunate. The Matthiessens came from serious money, and Peter, the second of three children, spent his early years in Irvington, New York, on a 62-acre estate called Matthiessen Park. The family then moved to an apartment on Fifth Avenue and eventually to an estate near Stamford, Connecticut. There was also a house on Fishers Island, designed by Matthiessen’s father, a society architect. His parents belonged to all the right clubs, and Matthiessen went to all the right schools: St. Bernard’s, Greenwich Country Day, Hotchkiss, Yale. But he hated all this privilege and the Waspy code of conduct that went with it. He was surly and rebellious, fought all the time with his parents, his father especially, and did everything he could to shed his blue-blood trappings. He even demanded that his name be stricken from the Social Register. He was happiest when he was by himself, especially on Fishers, where he loved to fish, watch birds, and collect snakes. Richardson says that for Matthiessen the island was a sort of prelapsarian Eden, and that the unspoken object of many of his trips was to find another such place.
Like many of his classmates, Matthiessen was a veteran before he was a college student. He entered Yale in the spring of 1947, after two mostly miserable years in the Navy: the war ended while he was still in basic training, and he wound up doing the laundry of returning soldiers who had seen real fighting. At Yale, as at Hotchkiss, Matthiessen was an indifferent student, often cutting class to go hiking or bird watching. But he showed promise as a writer (one of his stories was eventually bought by The Atlantic) and caught the eye of Norman Holmes Pearson, an English professor who moonlighted as a recruiter for the CIA. (Pearson was an unlikely spymaster. He was a slight, soft-spoken man who, because of a childhood illness, walked with a sort of twisted limp. When I got to Yale, in the mid-sixties, he was emeritus but still recruiting, or so it was said. I had no wish to become a spook, but, even so, was greatly miffed not to be asked.)
Richardson says that at least two dozen members of the Yale Class of 1950 were recruited by the agency. One of them was Bill Buckley, whose spy career is covered at some length in the Tanenhaus biography. He and Matthiessen shared a close friend, Thomas Guinzburg, who later became the head of Viking and one of Matthiessen’s publishers, but neither had much use for the other. Buckley was a conservative and a true believer, and spying came naturally to him. (You learn from Tanenhaus’ book that his handler was none other than the Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, who became a lifelong friend.) Matthiessen’s politics, on the other hand, were at that point “far from coherent,” Richardson says, and he became a spy less out of patriotic conviction than because it seemed a good way to get paid to live in Paris with his new wife and set about becoming a writer. He later wrote to his friend Ben Bradlee, “When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with yr beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain. Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that?”
This chapter of Matthiessen’s life later proved a source of great embarrassment. Richardson says that it was partly guilt over his CIA involvement that prompted Matthiessen’s thousands of pages of advocacy journalism, first when he covered Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers and then when he wrote (and found himself sued for libel by the governor of South Dakota) about Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement. Matthiessen was always evasive about the exact details of his undercover life, especially when it was suggested that he might have been using The Paris Review, of which he was a co-founder, as a front—allegations that greatly strained his friendship with that magazine’s editor, George Plimpton, whom he had known since boyhood. But Richardson’s account, as complete as we’re ever likely to get, makes the whole business seem fairly harmless. Matthiessen’s handler apparently suggested that just being a writer was insufficient cover for a spy: he needed a real job. Together with the eccentric Harold Humes he hatched a plan to create a magazine, just so there would be an office he could go to. Richardson says it’s unlikely that the CIA ever paid any attention to the magazine’s contents, and that its financial involvement, if any, was negligible. The Paris Review was always broke, and in need of bailouts from trust funds—those of the editors or their rich relatives.
As for Matthiessen’s spy duties, they consisted mostly of keeping an eye on French Communists and left-leaning American expats, like Richard Wright. Matthiessen’s most important assignment was someone he called “Monsieur X,” who Richardson thinks was probably Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist poet and essayist. Whoever he was, Monsieur X succeeded in converting the spy, rather than the other way round. By the beginning of 1953, after long conversations with X, Matthiessen had swung sufficiently leftward that he could no longer stomach the CIA and its knee-jerk anti-communism, and he told the agency he was quitting.
Together with his wife and infant son, he moved to Springs, out on Long Island, where he became a Bonacker, as the men who made their living fishing, clamming, and scalloping on the Great South Bay were called. For a while at least, this was the happiest stretch of Matthiessen’s life. He loved the work, which also allowed him to write when the weather was bad and during the slow winter months, and he loved the companionship of the baymen. He wrote one of his better books about them: Men’s Lives, a moving elegy for a way of life that was already disappearing even as he chronicled it. But this idyll, another of Matthiessen’s attempts to find a simpler, more honest way of being in the world, was probably doomed from the beginning. He was far too patrician to pass himself off as a blue-collar fisherman, and life out on the far end of Long Island held little appeal for his wife, Patsy Southgate, a famous beauty who had artistic aspirations of her own. Bored, lonely, neglected, she began an affair. Matthiessen, when he found out, became so angry that he stalked right out of the marriage, leaving her with the children. (By now, there was a second.) Southgate, who while at Springs had become friendly with both Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner, went on to become an influential member of the New York art scene but resented Matthiessen to the end of her life. He, on the other hand, when his temper cooled down, came to see the breakup as a sort of mixed blessing. “It freed me,” he said.
Matthiessen loved women—lots of them: he was a serial philanderer, with a girl in every tent, it was sometimes said. But he also resented them—his three wives especially—for their expectations and demands, for wanting, as he saw it, to tie him down. In some of his letters, there is an unsettling streak of misogyny, just as there are traces of cultural condescension in his writing about Africans and Nepalis. For all his efforts to shake off the mantle of privilege, he remained in some ways an unreformed, old-fashioned white male.
In the early 1960s, Matthiessen began experimenting with psychedelic drugs. He tried everything: ayahuasca, psilocybin, mescaline (which he first took with Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul and . . .), and LSD, his favorite. Years later he was still recommending it to his friends, and even to their children. The drugs were yet another way of getting out of his own head, of seeing the world in a different way, and they also encouraged him—through their connection with Native American spirituality and dream visions—in his bonkers pursuit of Bigfoot and the yeti. He really believed in these creatures—or wanted to believe—and devoted countless hours to tracking them down. He even passed up his own National Book Award ceremony so he could join an FBI fugitive in the desert and check out a possible sighting. Richardson devotes probably more pages than necessary to this obsession but does his best to make sense of it.
Matthiessen’s second wife was Deborah Love, a would-be writer from a wealthy St. Louis family. On their first date they took mescaline together. She in the beginning was even more interested than he was in other ways of seeing. With her encouragement they went from mescaline to LSD, and when the visions it offered began to seem not pure enough or too repetitive, she moved on to yoga, to the Japanese tea ceremony, to Buddhism. Matthiessen took up Zen, Richardson says, partly just to compete with her. In many ways he was an unlikely Buddhist. Lots of people thought he was too rash, restless, and impulsive for such a quiet, disciplined practice. But he stuck with it, sitting for as long as 14 hours with his lanky frame folded into the painful lotus position, and slowly rose through the ranks until he became a roshi, or Zen priest, with a zendo on his own property in Sagaponack, where he led daily meditation sessions.
What Richardson can’t quite bring himself to say is that in many ways Matthiessen was a failed Buddhist, or at least an incomplete one. The “true nature” of Richardson’s title is the Buddhist term for an emptiness or absence of self—a state which Matthiessen seldom attained. His ego was too large. Nor was he able to declutter his personal life, as the Buddha recommended. He had too many attachments, too many distractions. And there’s not much trace of Zen in his writing. Matthiessen was more often a maximalist than a simplifier, always cramming in extra detail, as if abundance, not spareness, was the only way to get to the truth of things.
You could make a case that The Snow Leopard is a book that should never have been written. In order to join Schaller’s expedition, Matthiessen had to abandon his eight-year-old son, Alex, foisting him off on friends and neighbors, much too soon after the child had lost his mother. He promised Alex he would be home for Thanksgiving, knowing that was almost certainly impossible. He didn’t get back until December. All the same, The Snow Leopard is a beautiful, often stirring book—not only because of its crystalline descriptive writing, but because of the elegiac passages in which he recalls the death of Deborah Love, the ups and downs of their marriage, his failures as a man and as a husband. Toward the end he writes:
The path I followed breathlessly has faded among the stones; in spiritual ambition, I have neglected my children and done myself harm, and there is no way back. Nor has anything changed; I am still beset by the same old lusts and ego and emotions, the endless nagging details and irritations—that aching gap between what I know and what I am.
But the book also contains a fair amount of mystical woowoo (“I know this mountain because I am this mountain”) and in places is stuffed almost to the bursting point with information about ancient religions, the history of Buddhism, its various schools and sects. Getting through these pages is heavy going, and there are places when you almost want to look away, when the writing overheats and blows a fuse: “My head is the sorcerer’s skull cap full of blood, and were I to turn, my eyes would see straight to the heart of chaos, the mutilation, bloody gore, and pain that is seen darkly in the bright eye of this lizard.” Had Matthiessen really attained the kind of transcendence he was seeking, the book might have been a lot shorter.
Of all the novels, the only one remotely Zen-like is Far Tortuga (1975), which was Matthiessen’s favorite. It’s also his best, and what makes it so good is that it’s the sparest and least Matthiessen-like. Here his own voice is almost absent. A story of nine men sailing on a decrepit schooner from Grand Cayman to the western Caribbean in hope of catching green sea turtles, it’s told mostly in Creole dialect. This would probably get Matthiessen in trouble today, on grounds of “appropriation,” but it’s meticulously and convincingly done. Matthiessen, whose ear was as good as his eye, even gets the little distinctions between Cayman speech and Jamaican, say. The descriptive writing, what little there is, is so stripped down it reads like stage directions. Sometimes snatches of phrases, or even single words, just float in white space, like this:
wind
black clouds across the stars
night squalls
The book was so uncharacteristic of Matthiessen that its editor at Random House, the normally discerning Joe Fox, published it only under duress. He made a number of dumb suggestions and, when Matthiessen rebuffed them, didn’t do much to promote the book. Matthiessen, an epic grudge-holder, never forgave him. Until just a few days before Fox died, he couldn’t stop haranguing him.
The novel for which Matthiessen won the 2008 National Book Award, Shadow Country, is a great slab of a book, longer even than Richardson’s biography. It’s actually a distillation, or a re-rendering, of three earlier books—a saga about a real-life figure named Edgar Watson, an outlaw and sugar-cane planter who lived in the Florida Everglades at the turn of the twentieth century. Like almost everyone, Matthiessen was never satisfied with the trilogy, and in time even he came to accept that the problem was the second volume, Lost Man’s River, which was immensely long and a mess. The two top editors at Random House, Jason Epstein and Bob Loomis, wanted nothing to do with it, and the job eventually fell to my friend the late Dan Menaker, who had just been hired away from The New Yorker. He used to complain to me that when Matthiessen came in for an editing session, he would insist on reading aloud from the manuscript, saying things like, “Listen to this—it’s really good. I had forgotten how good this stuff is.” Dan desperately wanted to be rid of this project without offending the author, and he finally figured out how: he told Matthiessen that he simply wasn’t smart enough to deal with a work of such magnitude.
The one-volume version, which Matthiessen worked for years on with the help of a long-suffering editor named Judy Sternlight, is certainly an improvement, and it’s still talked about (though by fewer and fewer people) as a masterpiece. It’s true there are sections—the beginning especially—so good they remind you of Faulkner, but there are also stretches that feel interminable (part 2 is still a problem), and the book suffers from telling the same stories over and over from different points of view. It’s a novel that wants to be about everything: Blacks, Indians, the Civil War, the Depression, gun violence, environmental exploitation. Even when it was done, Matthiessen said it wasn’t really finished and threatened to rewrite it some more.
One of the great lessons Zen teaches is that death is simply a step on a continuum—something to be accepted, not feared. But even that consolation was denied Matthiessen. He used to say, “My ambition is to die the way ripe fruit lets go of a tree, the way a mushroom disappears in a forest wind—poof!” But when, at the age of 86, he was in the last stages of leukemia, he clung to life in a way that only increased his suffering. He even volunteered for an experimental drug trial that caused his lips to blister and ulcers to form on the soft tissues of his mouth, and he spent agonizing days in a hospital and not at home as he wished, near his writing shed and his zendo. To the end, he wanted not less, but more.
[1] TRUE NATURE: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, by Lance Richardson. Pantheon. $40.00.
